Excerpt:Alice Walker was named Humanist of the Year in 1997 by the non-theist American Humanist Association, an organization I've loved and supported for many years.

The AHA states:Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism and other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity. In her acceptance speech, she read from her following essay, which I’ve excerpted here:

The Only Reason You Want to Go to Heaven is That You Have Been Driven Out of Your Mind by Alice Walker

…The church I attended as a child still stands. It is small, almost tiny, and made of very old, silver gray lumber, painted white a couple of decades ago, when an indoor toilet was also added. It is simple, serene, sweet. It used to nestle amid vivid green foliage at a curve in a sandy dirt road…

Because we were Methodists, and sang mostly standard hymns, the singing wasn't all that great. I loved it, though, because I liked singing with others still do and I was, even as a small child, humbled by the sincerity in the voices of everyone. After we sang any kind of song together, there was nobody in the congregation I didn't love…

My mother, in addition to her other duties as worker, wife, and mother of eight children, was also mother of the church. I realize now that I was kind of a little church mother in training, as I set out for the church with her on Saturday mornings. We would mop the bare pine floors, run dust rags over the benches and wash the windows… On Sunday morning she would bring flowers from her garden…

Sister Walker, my mother, was thanked for making the church so beautiful, but this wise woman, who knew so many things about life and the mysteries of the heart, the spirit, and the soul, was never asked to speak to the congregation…

What kind of God would be so cruel as to curse women and men forever for eating a piece of fruit, no matter how forbidden? …That some people enslaved and abused others was taken for granted by Him. He ordered the killing of women and children, by the hundreds of thousands, if they were not of his chosen tribe…

Life was so hard for my parents' generation that the subject of heaven was never distant from their thoughts. The preacher would gleefully, or so it seemed to me, run down all the trials and tribulations of an existence that ground us into dust, only to pull heaven out of the biblical hat at the last minute…

The truth was, we already lived in paradise but were worked too hard by the land-grabbers to enjoy it. This is what my mother, and perhaps the other women knew, and this was one reason why they were not permitted to speak. They might have demanded that the men of the church notice Earth. Which always leads to revolution. In fact, everyone has known this for a very long time. For the other, more immediate and basic reason my mother and the other women were not permitted to speak in church was that the Bible forbade it. And it is forbidden in the Bible because, in the Bible, men alone are sanctioned to own property, in this case, Earth itself. And woman herself is property, along with the asses, the oxen, and the sheep.

… For God wrote the Bible…; and every word, even every word about murdering the suckling babies of your enemies and stealing all their worldly goods, was Truth.

…Because of the criminal exploitation inherent in the sharecropping system-in which the landowner controlled land, seeds, and tools, as well as records of account, sharecroppers were often worse off than slaves, which was the point. Sharecropping was the former slave owners' revenge against black people for having attained their freedom. It is no wonder that under such complete subjugation and outright terrorism that included rape, beatings, burnings, and being thrown off the land, along with the entrenched Southern custom of lynching, people like my parents sought succor from any God they were forced to have. The idea that as descendants of Africans and Native Americans and Europeans Scottish and Irish on both my mother's and my father's side, they might have had their own ancient Gods, or that as free human beings they might choose a God uniquely perceived by themselves, never entered their minds, except negatively. The "heathen" from whom they were descended knew nothing of salvation, they were warned in church, and any God except the one in the Bible was just another illusion produced by Satan, designed to keep them out of heaven…

"Pagan" means "of the land, country dweller, peasant," all of which my family was. It also means a person whose primary spiritual relationship is with Nature and the Earth. And this, I could see, day to day, was true not only of me but of my parents; but there was no way to ritually express the magical intimacy we felt with Creation without being accused of, and ridiculed for, indulging in heathenism, that other word for paganism. And Christianity, we were informed, had fought long and hard to deliver us from that. In fact, millions of people were broken, physically and spiritually, literally destroyed, for nearly two millennia, as the orthodox Christian Church "saved" them from their traditional worship of the Great Mystery they perceived in Nature.

IN THE SIXTIES MANY OF US SCARED OUR PARENTS profoundly when we showed up dressed in our "African" or "Native American" or "Celtic" clothes. We shocked them by wearing our hair in its ancient naturalness. They saw us turning back to something they'd been taught to despise, and that by now they actively feared. Many of our parents had been taught that the world was only two or three thousand years old, and that spiritually civilized life began with the birth of Jesus Christ. .

But basically, according to the Scriptures: We had sinned. I did not know then that the root of the word "sin" means "to be." Woman was the cause. All of our life we must suffer just because we existed. Worthless, worthless us. Luckily enough, we would die, but even then only a very small number of us would get into heaven. There was hell, a pit of eternally burning fire, for the vast majority…

I had a problem with this doctrine at a very early age: I could not see how my parents had sinned... They were as innocent as trees, I felt. And, at heart, generous and sweet. I resented the minister and the book he read from that implied they could only be "saved" by confessing their sin and accepting suffering and degradation as their due, just because a very long time ago a snake had given a white woman an apple and she had eaten it and generously given a bite to her craven hearted husband. This was insulting to the most drowsy intelligence, I thought…

IT IS IRONIC, TO SAY THE LEAST, THAT THE VERY WOMAN out of whose body I came, whose pillowy arms still held me, willingly indoctrinated me away from herself and the earth from which both of us received sustenance, and toward a frightful, jealous, cruel, murderous "God" of another race and tribe of people, and expected me to forget the very breasts that had fed me and that I still leaned against. But such is the power of centuries-old indoctrination.

We know now with what absolute heartlessness the male leaders of the orthodox Christian church not unlike those of orthodox Judaism and Islam stamped out, generally after robbing them of their land and enslaving them, pagans and heathens, our ancestors and theirs, around the globe: a campaign of such unspeakable cruelty which has lasted for so long, and which still continues, that few have had the heart to encounter it in art, politics, literature, or consciousness until the present era…

IN THE BLACK CHURCH WE HAVE LOVED AND leaned on Moses… But here is another look at Moses...

“And Moses said unto them, have ye saved all the women alive? …Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man. But all the women children, that have not known a man, keep alive for yourselves... And the Lord spoke unto Moses saying, Take the sum of the prey that was taken, both of man and of beast… And the booty, being the rest of the prey which the men of war had caught was six hundred thousand and seventy thousand and five thousand sheep, And threescore and one thousand beeves, And threescore and one thousand asses, And thirty and two thousand persons in all of women that had not known man.”

These miserable, grieving, orphaned young women and children ended up as sex slaves, concubines and drudges in the service of the soldiers and the priests…

It is chilling to think that the same people who persecuted the wise women and men of Europe, its midwives and healers, then crossed the oceans to Africa and the Americas, and tortured and enslaved, raped, impoverished, and eradicated the peaceful, Christlike people they found. And that the blueprint from which they worked, and still work, was the Bible…

IT IS FATAL TO LOVE A GOD WHO DOES NOT LOVE YOU. A God specifically created to comfort, lead, advise, strengthen, and enlarge the tribal borders of someone else. We have been beggars at the table of a religion that sanctioned our destruction. Our own religions denied, forgotten; our own ancestral connections to All Creation something of which we are ashamed…

THERE IS A SPECIAL GRIEF FELT BY THE children and grandchildren of those who were forbidden to read, forbidden to explore, forbidden to question or to know. Looking back on my parents' and grandparents' lives I have often felt overwhelmed, helpless, as I've examined history and society, and especially religion, with them in mind, and have seen how they were manipulated away from a belief in their own judgment and faith in themselves.

It is most painful to realize they were forever trying to correct a "flaw" that of being black,female and human that did not exist, except as "men of God," but really men of greed, misogyny and violence, defined it. What a burden to think one is conceived in sin, rather than in pleasure; that one is born into evil rather than into joy. In my work, I speak to my parents and to my most distant ancestors about what I myself have found as an Earthling growing naturally out of the Universe. I create characters who sometimes speak in the language of immediate ancestors, characters who are not passive, but active in the discovery of what is vital and real in this world. Characters who explore what it would feel like not to be imprisoned by the hatred of women, the love of violence, and the destructiveness of greed taught to human beings as the "religion" by which they must guide their lives.

What is happening in the world more and more is that people are attempting to decolonize their spirits. A crucial act of empowerment, one that might return reverence to the Earth, thereby saving it, in this fearful-of-Nature, spiritually colonized age.

AN EXAMPLE OF THIS DECOLONIZATION occurs in The Color Purple: Shug, the pagan, discusses the nature of God with Celie, the confused Christian:

…What God do for me? I ast.

She say, Celie! Like she shock. He gave you life, good health, and a good woman that love you to death.

Yeah, I say, and he give me a lynched daddy, a crazy mama, a lowdown dog of a step pa and a sister I probably won't ever see again. Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown. She say, Miss Celie. You better hush. God might hear you.

Let'im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you…

All my life I never care what people thought bout nothing I did, I say. But deep in my heart I care about God. What he going to think. And come to find out, he don't think. Just sit up there glorying in being deef, I reckon…

She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found god in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find god. Some folks didn't have him to share, I said. They the ones didn't speak to me while I was there struggling with my big belly and Mr. children…

Whenever you trying to pray, and a man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up flowers, wind, water, a big rock.

But this hard work, let me tell you. He been there so long, he don't want to budge. He threaten lightning, floods and earthquakes. Us fight. I hardly pray at all. Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it.Amen.